Dead Man's Footsteps

shot her a warning glance, but she shrugged and ate another Malteser. He turned to Emma-Jane Boutwood. ‘E-J, I also want you to take charge of drawing the family tree on the Wilsons.’
    ‘Actually, I have something to report,’ Norman Potting said. ‘I did my homework last night on the PNC. Ronnie Wilson had form.’
    ‘Previous?’ Grace said.
    ‘Yes. He was a frequent flyer with Sussex Police. First time on the radar was 1987. He worked for a dodgy secondhand car dealership that was clocking cars, bunging written-off ones back together.’
    ‘What happened?’ Grace asked.
    ‘Twelve months, pope on a rope. Then he popped up again.’
    Bella Moy interrupted him. ‘Excuse me – did you say pope on a rope ?’
    ‘Yes, gorgeous.’ Potting mimed being hung from a rope around his neck. ‘Suspended sentence.’
    ‘Any chance you could speak in a language we all understand?’ she retorted.
    Potting blinked. ‘I thought we did all understand cockney rhyming slang. That’s what villains speak.’
    ‘In movies from the 1950s,’ she said. ‘ Your generation of villains.’
    ‘Bella,’ Grace cautioned gently.
    She shrugged and said nothing.
    Norman Potting continued. ‘In 1991, Terry Biglow went down for four years. Knocker boy, ripping off old ladies.’ He paused and looked at Bella. ‘ Knocker boy. All right with that? I’m not talking about boobies.’
    ‘I know what knocker boys are,’ she said.
    ‘Good,’ he continued. ‘Ronnie Wilson worked for him. Got charged as his accomplice, but a smart brief got him off on a technicality. I spoke to Dave Gaylor, who was the case officer.’
    ‘Worked with Terry Biglow?’ Grace said.
    Everyone in the room knew the name Biglow. They were one of the city’s long-established crime families. Several generations into everything from drug dealing, stolen antiques and call girls to witness intimidation, they were just plain trouble in all its forms.
    Grace looked at DI Mantle. ‘Seems you could be right, Lizzie. There’s enough there at least to announce we have a suspect.’
    Alison Vosper would like that, he thought. She always liked that phrase, We have a suspect . It made her in turn look good to her boss, the Chief Constable. And if her boss was happy, then she was happy.
    And if she was happy, she tended to stay out of his face.

55
11 SEPTEMBER 2001
    Refreshed after a shower, which had washed the grey dust out of his hair and helped him to partly sober up, Ronnie lounged on the pink candlewick bedspread with the two cigarette burn holes. His thirty-dollar-a-night room did not run to a headboard, so he lay back against the bare wall, studying the news on the fuzzy screen of the clapped-out television and smoking a cigarette.
    He watched the two planes repeatedly crash into the Twin Towers. The burning Pentagon. The solemn face of Mayor Giuliani praising the NYPD and the fire officers. The solemn face of President Bush declaring his War on Terrorism. The solemn faces of all the grey ghosts.
    The dim, low-wattage bulbs added to the gloominess of this room. He had drawn the drab curtains over his view across the alleyway to the wall of the next-door house. At this moment the whole world beyond his little room seemed solemn and gloomy.
    However, despite the raging headache from all the vodka he had drunk, he did not feel gloomy. Shocked at all that he had seen today, at all that had happened to his plans, yes. But here in this room he felt safe. Cocooned in his thoughts. The realization that the opportunity of a lifetime had presented itself to him.
    He realized, also, that he had left more stuff behind inhis room at the W. His plane tickets, as well as his passport, and some of his underwear. But instead of being concerned, he was rather pleased.
    He looked down at his mobile phone, checking for the thousandth time that it was switched off. Getting paranoid that it might, somehow, of its own volition, have switched itself back on. That suddenly Lorraine’s voice would be on the other end, screaming with joy or, more likely, cursing him for not having called her.
    He saw something scurrying across the carpet. It was a dark brown roach, about half an inch long. He knew that cockroaches were among the few creatures that could survive a nuclear war. They had reached perfection through evolution. Survival of the fittest.
    Yep, well, he was pretty fit too. And now that his plan was taking shape, he knew exactly what his first step was going to be.
    He